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Published: October 5th 2008
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Adelaide was the place we picked up Helen. Buying her was less than straightforward. We found a guy called Nick who sells cars and vans to backpackers, sorting out the registration etc. To cut a long story short, we spent at least a day and a half at his garage whilst he told us about his religious beliefs and how we needed to prepare ourselves for Lucifer's 'last great deception'. I thought we were there for good. In fairness though, he sold us a good van.
Because we spent so much time at Nick's, we didn't really get to see much of Adelaide. What we saw was quite nice though.
After picking up the van and getting her fully equipped, we headed out to the Barossa Valley wine region. We parked up in a camp site and walked out to a few of the wineries including Jacobs Creek. We swaggered back to the van, very happy people.
We then headed south, back through Adelaide and down to Cape Jervis to catch the ferry across to Kangaroo Island. The ferry terminal was a little bit further away than we had thought and we had to race to get there
- not easy when you're in a van with a top speed of 80km/h (yes, that's 50mph). The weather on Kangaroo Island was pretty wet and wild, but the wildlife was amazing and we saw our first koalas, Australian sealions, New Zealand fur seals, fairy penguins (smallest penguins in the world) and loads of kangaroos. No echidna train though!
Back on the mainland, we were on constant whale watch - it was to be another week before we saw some (3 southern rights!).
After following the coast for a little bit, we came inland and went to see the fossils at Naracoorte caves before heading to yet another wine region - Coonawara. Coonawara was a brilliant one to visit. We found a little rest area on the side of the road, less than a minute away from the first and no further than a mile away from the last winery of our crawl. At the time we were a bit disappointed to only manage 5 wineries (mainly because we took longer and longer in each, chatting and trying everything on offer) but in hindsight, we needed no more - I have to admit, I was quite unwell by
the end of it all.
Unsurprisingly, we didn't really feel like doing much the next day, so we just headed further south and set up camp in Mount Gambier, near one of the crater lakes there. After a day in Mount Gambier, it was on the road again for the border crossing in to Victoria.
It was then a few more days until we hit the Great Ocean Road, where the highway clings to the cliffs. Along the way we stopped at all the sights including Bay of Islands, the Grotto, London Bridge, The Arch, Loch Ard Gorge and the Twelve Apostles (in the hail), Erskine Falls - absolutely amazing views pretty much all the way along. Halfway along we camped in a forest where there were koalas all around us. Then it was on to Aireys Inlet lighthouse, the setting for Round the Twist!
From Aireys Inlet we headed up to Geelong for the night. We thought we found a suitable rest area but it was right by people's houses so we were a little bit unsure that we should be sleeping there. In the middle of the night, we got woken up by a knocking
on the window. Memories of the first couple of nights of roadtrip 1 came back to me. Del said that we should just lie there and pretend we weren't there, I was certain that we were going to get fined so I thought I'd better go out and try to fight our corner. I opened the door and tried to look out but was blinded by the spotlights that were pointing right at us - I thought there must've been an armed response unit there or something. Anyway, as I got out, a young lad came up and apologised for waking us up. It turned out that his car had broken down and was after some help. It just so happened that as he was knocking on our window the police passed and stopped to see what was going on. Why they felt it necessary to fully illuminate us, I don't know, but if there was anything wrong with us staying there they didn't tell us. It was a struggle to get back to sleep after such a rude awakening.
On to Melbourne....
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